In the wake of the devastating Argentine
economic crisis of 2001, Buenos Aires has undergone one of the largest
real estate booms in the city’s history—a boom that is fundamentally
reconfiguring the urban landscape. In the midst of a whirlwind of urban
development, several middle-class neighborhood activist groups have
emerged to contest the effects of the boom on the identity of their
neighborhoods and city. One of these activist groups, Palermo Despierta,
has begun a campaign in the Palermo district to prevent the
construction of residential mega-towers - an icon of urban development
since the crisis. This middle-class activism largely contradicts
scholarship that pigeonholes middle-class urban dwellers as agents of
“globalization-oriented urban development.” I argue that underlying the
resistance is a desire to defend an historically imagined, national
narrative of middle-class European identity inscribed in the urban
space of Buenos Aires. In a nation and city recovering from crisis, porteños (Buenos
Aires residents) are more willing than ever to contest the globalizing
of their city in order to re-emplace national narratives that remain at
the heart of their urban identity. This nascent activism is deeply
paradoxical, however, as the narratives that animate Palermo Despierta
operate on the basis of racial and class distinctions. Contrary to the
claims of scholars like Saskia Sassen and Arjun Appadurai, I argue that
Buenos Aires demonstrates that the process of deterritorialization has
been accompanied by processes of middle-class reterritorialization in
post-crisis Buenos Aires. I also offer a revision of the view that
neoliberalism is a totalizing form of global hegemony. Post-crisis
Buenos Aires illustrates that the global hegemony of neoliberalism is
itself contested, resisted, and reworked by the national hegemony of
middle-classness and Europeanness. [Article]